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Where Grant’s Nursery used to be

During my early childhood, my family moved to five acres and a house on the Mooresville Pike. That area now is within the city limits, but back then it was decidedly rural.

If you didn’t know where Grant’s Nursery once was, your chances of finding us using our mother’s directions were slim. For reasons I never understood, she always began with, “You know where Grant’s Nursery used to be…”

Pity the person who didn’t know! I guess they just asked around.

Towards town from “the Nursery,” the road was lined with well-spaced houses.

Instead of the current church, a huge pigpen was across from a grocery that eventually became Thompson’s Grocery. Pete Fogg had a store across from Scribners’ storage garage. Gertie Mayes’ grocery was right before the intersection with Cemetery Avenue.

Coming from town out the Pike, a big curve was the former site of Grant’s Nursery.

Beyond it, a branch crossed under a small concrete bridge. Someone’s minnow box was always submerged in this branch next to our neighbors, the Bells, house.

On the left just past that branch was a mysterious dirt lane, Morgan Springs Road. I guess it was a road. But no one who lived down it had a car, so people just ambled backthat way until they disappeared. Sooner or later, they showed up again.

The railroad tracks were back there. I never saw them, but heard the trains. I think once someone got tied to those tracks and murdered by the train cutting off their head. I wasn’t supposed to hear about that.

Next on the Pike came three houses, maybe more. The second was ours. I think it was four rooms when we got it. We added on — put in a bathroom. Outbuildings sprang up; a front porch got enclosed; the attic became an upstairs. The house swelled through the years to accommodate us.

Across the road was a large hill-type field that later got a house built at its highest point. On up the Pike were two fine Southern plantation homes facing each other, Elm Springs and Fairmount.

At one time, great fields of buttercups grew and bloomed in front of Elm Springs.

I don’t know when they got mowed down. There were always rumors of Elm Springs having trap doors and secret passages and walls thick enough to hide in.

Its sister mansion, Fairmount, was in poor repair and was used as a nursing home.

Though the accommodations were very basic, Mrs. Miller, who ran it, seemed to treat her patients well.

Beyond these were other homes scattered along the Pike — the Baileys’ and the Murphy Orchard place among others. The Nelsons were back another mysterious path.

My first, and worst, memory of the Mooresville Pike is how it kept collecting on the living room furniture. When we moved there, it was a dirt road and our house was right on the road. Privet hedge and paving eventually eased that problem.

Our section of the road was a good one to speed on. Then as now, it was hard to resist letting loose at the top of the hill and barreling down it. So late nights, headlights danced on the bedroom walls to the tune of roaring engines.

A strange thing happened during one particularly fierce spring-rain period. A neighbor came to tell us they were picking up buckets of fish in the field across from us. The branch must have risen in a flash flood and left lots of fish stranded as it settled back into its banks.

Buddy, my older brother, actually went and picked a bucket of fish. But by the time he went back with a second bucket, fish-picking was over. In our neighborhood, the fish weren’t there for long.

Things were all the time getting stolen. Often we’d get ready to harvest peaches, peas, whatever. Limbs or vines that had been loaded the day before would be bare. On Halloween, Mama even locked up the swing.

Though the Mooresville Pike is several miles long, the part with these memories began up the road at Elm Springs and ended at the big curve…uh-h-h…where Grant’s Nursery once was.

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